SIMPLIFYING TECH: Musical.ly

The app dominating the market of primarily tweens all over the world — apart from maybe Snapchat is undoubtedly:

Musical.ly: A mobile app that facilitates the creation of music videos that is inspiring young people to create content and grow audiences from their smartphones using their favorite tunes.

The app launched in late 2014 but really started to gather momentum during the summer of 2015. Now a year later, the app has grown drastically and is used by virtually every tween with access to a smartphone.

Lately, Musical.ly has expanded and is attracting older users as well as collaborating with artists/mucisians to create more interactive content for their users.

A lot of different musicians have been using the app to promote their new music and interact with their fans by creating “contests” and creating hashtags like the Selena Gomez #KillEmWithKindness #DuetWithSelenaGomez contest pictured above. In this way, the platform has grown by both benefiting fans and creators simultaneously.

Musically vs. Snapchat

In part, the success of Musical.ly can be attributed to the app’s discovery features that are integrated right into the platform, allowing new users to find great content and follow different users. This is one of the big differences between Musical.ly and Snapchat, since the latter functions primarily on the users’ pre-existing contacts/friends and has virtually no ways of finding new content from within the platfrom.

By using Musical.ly’s search button on the lower left hand corner of the screen, users can find trending hashtags as well as contests and the leaderboard of top musical.ly users (called Musers.) As a result, anybody can use these features to discover new people to follow or find ideas about what to create/what is popular at that particular moment.

How does Musical.ly work?

The app’s intuitive design makes it incredibly easy to use and to create, edit and share content right from your screen. When you open Musical.ly, you can see a yellow + button in the middle section of the bottom part of your screen. When pressing this button, users are given the option between:

Pick Music — an option that allows you to choose a song from Musical.ly’s giant library of songs to use as the soundtrack to your videos.

Shoot First — a way of recording original sound for your videos which allow users to create covers of famous songs or showcase their own talent.

From Library — the choice that lets you use pre-recorded/edited content like videos and photo slideshows to share with your audience.

With these options, users have the ability to get really creative with the app and make a variety of different videos, ranging from lip syncing to comedy and dance choreography. Throughout my time testing this app I have been amazed by the different ways people are using Musical.y and the massive audiences that users are growing every day.

Despite no longer being a tween, I have been experimenting with the app and I’ve found it to be a really fun, creative experience. You can find me on Musical.ly as @vickyfloresn